1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for preventing discomfort to a patient being examined with a stethoscope. The method and apparatus also prevents transmission of contagious diseases between patients successively examined with the same stethoscope.
2. Discussion of the Prior Art
An almost universally shared experience is the discomfort felt by a patient when a physician places the relatively cold face of a stethoscope head against the patient's body. The prior art has addressed this problem in two primarily different ways. In one approach the stethoscope head is stored in an insulated or heated holder prior to use in order to prevent the head from cooling down significantly below the human body temperature. This approach requires the physician to wear objectionable equipment such as the holder and, if the holder is heated, a battery pack. Moreover, there is considerable inconvenience in having to remove the stethoscope from the holder before use and to replace it in the holder after use.
In a second prior art technique the stethoscope head is maintained at a constant comfortable temperature by an electrical heater built into the stethoscope. While somewhat more convenient to use than the separately supported stethoscope, the built in heater adds considerable expense to the unit. In addition, it has been found that when the heater batteries wear out, physicians tend to forget or otherwise neglect to replace them. As a consequence, after some limited time period the stethoscope, in spite of its built-in heater, is no longer thermally comfortable for patients.
A totally separate problem associated with stethoscopes relates to examination of a patient having a contagious disease. Under such circumstances it is not clinically desirable for the stethoscope to be reused for another patient without first sterilizing the stethoscope. Sterilizing the stethoscope, on the other hand, is inconvenient, time consuming and expensive.